Wedding DJ at Brookgreen Gardens in Murrells Inlet, SC

The Space

Archer and Anna Hyatt Huntington first saw this land in 1929 and went on to buy nearly 9,100 acres of forest, swamp, rice fields, and beachfront between Murrells Inlet and Pawleys Island. Anna was a sculptor, and the property they built became a place to show her work and that of other American figurative sculptors, incorporated on July 13, 1931, as a private, not-for-profit society for southeastern flora and fauna, and opened to the public in 1932 as the first sculpture garden of its kind in the country.

The grounds sit across four former rice plantations, named The Oaks, Brookgreen, Springfield, and Laurel Hill, and that agricultural history shaped the land long before the Huntingtons arrived. Today the sculpture collection has grown to about 1,445 works, displayed throughout the Archer and Anna Hyatt Huntington Sculpture Garden, with Anna’s own reputation extending well beyond South Carolina: her sculpture of Joan of Arc stands in New York City’s Riverside Park.

Capacity & Layout

Private events at Brookgreen Gardens are available to members, which is worth knowing upfront since it changes how a couple approaches booking here compared to a venue that takes reservations from the general public. We have worked an event on these grounds, and the scale of the property is part of what makes it unusual: 9,100 acres gives a couple room to choose from sculpture gardens, botanical plantings, and trail-adjacent settings rather than a single fixed reception hall.

A 1,600-acre portion of the property was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978, and the 551-acre sculpture garden itself was named part of a National Historic Landmark, alongside the Huntingtons’ former home Atalaya, in 1984. Brookgreen is also one of only five institutions in South Carolina accredited by both the American Alliance of Museums and the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, a dual distinction that reflects the Lowcountry Zoo operating alongside the gardens and sculpture collection on the same grounds.

Amenities

Beyond the sculpture garden, the property includes the Lowcountry Zoo, botanical plantings with more than 2,000 identified species, and the Lowcountry Trail, a boardwalk that crosses a hillside overlooking Mainfield, a restored rice field from the former Brookgreen Plantation, and that trail has won the South Carolina Heritage Tourism Award. A Labyrinth on the grounds, built in 2009 and substantially redesigned in 2014 under artist Kenny Pellar, adds another distinct stop for guests to walk through during an event.

On-site dining runs through a cafe and restaurant, and parking is available on the property, which matters given how much ground a couple and their guests may cover moving between garden areas over the course of an event. Each year the gardens host Nights of a Thousand Candles, an evening event lit with more than 2,700 candles and countless additional lights, giving a sense of how dramatically these grounds can be transformed after dark.

Location & Getting There

Brookgreen Gardens sits on Waccamaw Neck in Georgetown County, between the Waccamaw River and the Atlantic Ocean, along Highway 17 between Murrells Inlet and Pawleys Island, a Lowcountry setting distinct from anywhere else on the Grand Strand. Regular hours run 9:30am to 5pm daily, which shapes when a private event can realistically start relative to public visiting hours.

With sculpture gardens, open lawns, and trail settings spread across the grounds, sound at Brookgreen behaves differently depending on where a couple lands: dense plantings and garden walls absorb and contain sound in the more enclosed garden rooms, while open lawn areas call for a DJ to plan for wider dispersion, since there are no walls nearby to hold the music in.